Guest editorial: Special issue on visualization and visual analytics

This special issue is devoted to the new research addressing challenges in the areas of visualization and visual analytics. Visualization and visual analytics are closely related research areas, both concentrating on developing visual techniques to reveal meaningful information out of various data in real-life applications. Visualization as a field has its roots in Computer Graphics and has become a popular research area over the years. The field of visual analytics is relatively young with a concentration on analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. In general, visualization and visual analytics research is tightly connected with certain types of data or applications and researchers in both fields strive to discover known or unknown data patterns for domain users.